The present invention relates to transaction processing, and more particularly to allocating work to transaction processing monitors.
A transaction can be defined as a change in state of a system where the change state confirms to the ACID (Atomicity, Concurrence, Isolation and Durability) properties. A Transaction manager is a software that ensures transactionality in a business transaction environment. Typically transaction managers control millions of real time electronic transactions that happen in a day throughout the world. Hence, the transaction managers are required to be highly available and also execute transactions with a fast response time. Transaction managers are usually deployed in stock exchanges, reservation systems, insurance systems and other systems where the business data being handled is critical.
It is a common scenario to use a workload manager or a disaster recovery mechanism to provide high availability in the transaction processing environment. In Transaction Processing Monitor (TPM) such as IBM® CICS®, the workload manager achieves high availability by routing a request to one of the application owning region capable of servicing the transaction request. A region in a CICS® environment is an independent instance of TPM providing transaction services. In case of any failure in one of the application owning region, the subsequent requests are sent to an available application owning region capable of handling the request. In a real world situations, a single TPM instance handle hundreds or even thousands of concurrent transaction requests.